“An Easy Girl,” Reviewed: Rebecca Zlotowski’s Brilliant Portrayal of a Teen-ager’s Brush with Glitz - The New Yorker

With her blend of worldliness and otherworldliness, Zahia Dehar pairs tensely with the rough-edged modesty and shy sincerity of Mina Farid.Photograph Courtesy Netflix

“An Easy Girl” (“Une Fille Facile”), the new film by the French director Rebecca Zlotowski, borrows tropes, tones, and even a lead actress from reality TV. But it also looks behind the genre’s vulgar appeal—and the appeal of vulgarity—to locate the authentic substance that such spectacles demand and conceal. The film, which comes to Netflix on Thursday, reimagines the genre of a teen-age girl’s coming of age in the form of a tightly framed social experiment: she follows her much worldlier adult cousin into the social orbit of a rich older man and his yacht, and then she returns to her regular life. Moreover, Zlotowski crafts a distinctive style to distill and heighten the drama’s psychological complexities and societal analyses. No less than its young protagonists, the film dangerously brushes against the edge of modernity’s enticingly destructive glitz.

The film’s protagonist, Naïma (Mina Farid), is a high-school student, in Cannes, who lives with her mother (Loubna Abidar), a chambermaid at a nearby luxury hotel, in a modest apartment complex not far from the waterfront. She turns sixteen on the last day of school. When she gets home, she has a surprise: a visit from her twenty-two-year-old cousin, Sofia (Zahia Dehar), who has been living in Paris. Sofia is sexually candid and dripping with bling: she has jewelry, fancy clothing, and a Chanel handbag—and brings one for Naïma, too. In the evening, on the waterfront, Sofia and Naïma walk by a yacht that’s docked at the marina, and two middle-aged yachtsmen follow them to a nearby night club and invite them on board the boat. Naïma is scheduled for a summer internship, in the kitchen of the hotel where her mother works; she also has plans, with her best friend, Dodo (“Riley” Lakdhar Dridi), a classmate, to audition for acting school. Yet her pursuit of glamorous adventure threatens all of those plans. Over the next ten days, Naïma both consciously and naïvely follows Sofia into the high-finance, high-society whirl of brazen wealth and power and gets a heady apprenticeship in the ways of that cozy and cruel world—one that, for all its dangers, helps Naïma to see where she stands in relation to it, to see her path in life.

Dehar is one of France’s most prominent celebrities. She first came to public view in notoriety, in 2010—with a sex scandal involving some of France’s leading soccer players, who were accused of paying her for sex when she was seventeen. (The age of consent in France is fifteen—and even that is fluid—but prostitution is legal only at eighteen; the players were acquitted on the grounds that Dehar had claimed to be eighteen.) She then appeared on TV, became a model, and—with the help of Karl Lagerfeld and other fashion notables—launched, at the age of twenty, a line of designer lingerie. The casting of Dehar, in her first major acting role, is a coup de cinéma. Zlotowski grafts Dehar’s real-life energy, knowledge, and power into the film—and they’re embodied all the more movingly in her limpid, frank, and graceful performance. With her blend of worldliness and otherworldliness, bluntly practical candor and ethereal majesty, Dehar pairs tensely with the rough-edged modesty and shy sincerity of Farid, a nonprofessional actress, who plays Naïma pensively and brusquely, with an inescapable adolescent awkwardness, carrying the film ahead on a rush of newly concentrated and unleashed energy.

Zlotowski, who wrote the script with Teddy Lussi-Modeste, presents the story from the perspective of Naïma (she’s onscreen most of the time), whose voice-over narration lucidly punctuates the story with her insights and recollections. “An Easy Girl” is a tale of observation giving rise to action, of the spectator becoming a participant, which, in Zlotowski’s view, is the definition of a coming of age. What Naïma participates in— the workings of the world of business and money—is sketched with a scathing clarity. The yachtsmen whom the young women join are Andres (Nuno Lopes), a suavely bearded, guitar-playing, mightily wealthy Brazilian stock-market investor and art collector, and Philippe (Benoît Magimel), his art adviser, a sort of freelance cultural counsel who also functions as Andres’s paid companion and unofficial factotum (and whom Andres calls by the part-admiring, part-demeaning nickname of Socrates). Their yacht, when it’s docked, becomes a sort of theatre of luxury that local passersby watch, to Philippe’s embarrassment and Andres’s haughty contentment. When the two men meet up with Sofia and Naïma, the pairing off is obvious and automatic: Andres is pursuing Sofia for a sexual relationship, whereas Philippe becomes Naïma’s sort-of friend and sort-of mentor, even as more intimate possibilities loom.

Sofia has schooled Naïma to dismiss the idea of love in favor of “sensations, adventure” and advises her to take the initiative in pursuit of them. After Naïma sees Sofia having sex with Andres—and Sofia, noticing her, keeps Naïma locked in her gaze, not erotically but didactically—Sofia tells her, “For me, nothing happened last night.” What Sofia expects, instead, is money; she keeps literally none in her wallet, expecting that men will pay for everything, and she schools Naïma in the art of cashing in. Yet there’s far more to Sofia’s methods than the mere transaction; she’s a personality, a sharply expressive and insightful conversationalist, who carefully calibrates her remarks and her behavior in keeping with her keen awareness of the company she keeps. In a brief, remarkable scene, she explains to Naïma that she eats at home before going to dinner in society, because the point of being there isn’t to eat but to “pay attention to the people around you.”

Naïma takes her advice. In observing the relationship between Andres and Philippe, she learns that, for all of Philippe’s knowledge, he remains an employee in a constantly subordinate and occasionally humiliating position. Naïma also observes, in the reflection of other gazes, the strangeness of her own position: at a lavish dinner with Sofia, the two men, and their friends, at the hotel where Naïma’s mother works, she sees the staff, her friends, looking with wonder at her presence in that company and notices their stoic and silently judgmental immobility, at the sidelines, as the frivolous party stretches deep into the night and keeps them on duty, waiting to clean up. (She also gleans much from the silent gazes of the yacht’s uniformed waitstaff—and from the drama that ensues when that silence is broken.)

These scenes depict extraordinary moments of which-side-are-you-on, with characters’ gazes conveying distance or solidarity, incipient stock-taking or bold decision-making, with high stakes in the balance, sharp perceptions, and enduring bewilderments. Naïma’s carefully parsed perspective reflects her strange new world back onto the mental landscape of her regular life. With cinematography by Georges Lechaptois, “An Easy Girl” is filled with calm, luminous, dynamic images; it’s a wonderful film for watching people walk, for observing casual gestures and fleeting exchanges through seaside cityscapes and domestic spaces. The movie captures the passing of time both in the potentially terrifying rapidity of impulsive decisions and the stretched-out weight of recollection, weighty calculation, and tremulous anticipation—and its contemplative moments move just as fast, filled as they are with physical detail and mental energy, all conveyed in the reserved intricacy of the onscreen compositions.

The spirit of two movies looms over “An Easy Girl.” The first is “La Collectionneuse,” Éric Rohmer’s second feature, from 1967. Its first scene is virtually quoted here, in a sequence showing Sofia, in a bathing suit, on the beach, and zeroing in on parts of her body, in closeup, as Rohmer does with Haydée Politoff, an actress in his film. That movie tells the story of two men who, during a seaside summer vacation, find their romantic and erotic destinies tangled up with that of a young woman of seventeen, whose overt sexual freedom both shocks and entices them. Zlotowski offers a potent corrective to Rohmer’s film, which leaves the woman a cipher. The other film is “Blue Jeans,” a short from 1958, directed by Jacques Rozier, who’s now ninety-three. Rozier is perhaps the most secretly influential (and secretly great) director in the modern French cinema; the short, filmed in Cannes, is the story of two young men, pickup artists who cruise the seaside and the town, on their motor scooters and on foot, in the hope of meeting young women. (Money plays a role there, too.) Zlotowski alludes to it in a scene in which both Sofia and Naïma wear striped shirts akin to the one that Rozier’s film rendered iconic, even before Jean Seberg’s in “Breathless.” Here, too, though, Zlotowski depicts women’s power alongside that of men, while ultimately defining power itself in terms that aren’t solely or strictly gendered.

Power is the very subject of “An Easy Girl,” and Naïma’s first conscious encounter with it in its varied forms—sexual, economic, cultural, and sheerly, mysteriously interpersonal, starting with Sofia’s own hypnotic, seemingly telepathic ability to find and lure a likely man. Yet another aspect of power is sublimated: Naïma and Sofia are people of color, likely of North African descent (Dehar was born in Algeria), and the film converts matters of ethnicity and culture, which aren’t directly addressed, into terms of class and economics, access (or lack of it) to power and presence (or absence) of privilege. Looking from a lofty height and a stringent proximity at the ways of the world, Zlotowski offers a story of personality and allure, of the endowment of natural authority and what people who don’t have it must do to make their way through life.

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“An Easy Girl,” Reviewed: Rebecca Zlotowski’s Brilliant Portrayal of a Teen-ager’s Brush with Glitz - The New Yorker
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